I was curious about the 8800gtx with a ultra cooler. I know what I'm asking is extremely out dated info but I need to know because I just recently shoved two 8800gtx's in my wife's system to get her by for a few months. Before you judge me, I threw her beloved dell in the trash an put a intel quad extreme 3.4ghz in a Cooler Master Case with purple LED's (She LOVES the Ravens) while she was at work one day....
I was able to get a case that placed a 120mm fan over the back end of those cards to give the same ultra cooler efficiency but all the old post I've read give some pretty shady results for what the cards can be overclocked too for stability. Is there any old video's or post from Linus of what 8800gtx can handle, safe yet decent overclocks? Thanks for any help your able to give...

A "safe" overclock is an overclock that stays within the power and temperature envelope, there is no set "safe" clocks for any card you have to experiment, and what does you wife want to accomplish with these two cards? They're quite outdated but in SLI I'm sure 2 can run new games at low settings.

Well I was hoping when GW2 Comes out she'd atleast be able to run medium setting's since the game has a new min of a 7800gtx which is even worse then the cards I threw in her new pc. Right now she's been playing aion on high setting's with an average of 35-50fps. I've already bumped the core clock to 600mhz using Ntune since it'll automatically load that clock on start up, but have read conflicting ways to OC these cards using Ntune.
Everything else from cpu to memory is running tight & cool (4-4-4-12 @ 3.9ghz) but I'm very hesitant to ramp up these video cards without some guidance from someone who's done it and is honest. To many posers saying they've done it these day's and it's obvious they don't have a clue... So I was hoping an old video with real results would be floating around here or some screenshots...

I ran an 8800 GTS for six years -- had it running with a 25% core and 20% memory overclock at one point. Could only pull that off during the winter though, my card was finicky and would crash the instant it hit 82C.

The program I used was EVGA's Precision, though I've since switched to MSi Afterburner. They're at the heart the same program, updated versions of RivaTuner by a gentleman known as Unwinder. Both still use the RivaTuner Statistics Server for the on-screen display portions, actually. Functionally they're the same, I just prefer the UI of the old Precision/current Afterburner. For temperature testing I used FurMark, though these days I'd recommend MSI's Kombustor -- again, similar but better usability. Stability testing I've used loops of 3DMark, EVGA OC Scanner and OCCT 3.0 (only program I've found with dedicated video memory testing). However, there's nothing like game play to test your stability. I've had overclocks which passed every test I could find to run, and then crashed within moments of loading a particular game.

The best method I found from both researching and doing it myself is to ramp up clockspeeds first, then memory speeds. Memory seems to also have a more significant effect on temperatures.

Well I was hoping when GW2 Comes out she'd atleast be able to run medium setting's since the game has a new min of a 7800gtx which is even worse then the cards I threw in her new pc. Right now she's been playing aion on high setting's with an average of 35-50fps. I've already bumped the core clock to 600mhz using Ntune since it'll automatically load that clock on start up, but have read conflicting ways to OC these cards using Ntune.
Everything else from cpu to memory is running tight & cool (4-4-4-12 @ 3.9ghz) but I'm very hesitant to ramp up these video cards without some guidance from someone who's done it and is honest. To many posers saying they've done it these day's and it's obvious they don't have a clue... So I was hoping an old video with real results would be floating around here or some screenshots...

It's going to be tough to tell for GW2 for a while... The last update did more than double my performance and I was able to play maxed out even in WvW. That being said she will probably have to turn down to low in WvW or large dynamic events.

Edit: Galcobar pretty much has it right... If you are worried about burning out her card go in 15mhz steps monitor your temperatures (I prefer to keep mine below 75) and run MSI Kombustor (comes with afterburner which is handy) to make sure performance keeps going up with your OC... If performance goes down or temps get too high or you see artifacting back it back down to the level you were fine with and leave it there.

Also give it a test in the games she plays (GW2 stress test is on wednesday) I am able to run my 560 ti @980/1960, 2300 in every game except for BF3 so it all depends on what you are doing.

I ran an 8800 GTS for six years -- had it running with a 25% core and 20% memory overclock at one point. Could only pull that off during the winter though, my card was finicky and would crash the instant it hit 82C.

Thats good advice, I know the GTS was pretty similar to the GTX but also had better cooling. With her setup now she is running 44c idle and 54c full load. I just need a program that'll load settings on start up, because if she has to do anything outside what's normal for her it'll be a chore she won't commit too. I honestly didn't know MSI had afterburner so that's new to me, Thanks for the info.

GTS cooler was identical to the GTX cooler -- Nvidia simply extended the GTX PCB out another inch beyond the end of the cooler to accommodate additional power input and handling. This applies to the original GTS, however, which used a crippled version of the same G80 chip used in the GTX. The later GTS based on the G92 chip used a different cooler -- much to my irritation when I started looking for compatible aftermarket coolers and discovered there were plenty for the G92 version but almost none for the G80.

Afterburner can be configured to load settings on start-up. I set my profiles up to drop the card down to its minimums when idling or in basic 2D mode (e.g. video playback). These cards don't have a true idle state. A modern card such as the GTX 480 drops down to 51 MHz when at the desktop, ramps up to 450 MHz when lightly stressed, and only kicks up to its full 700 MHz (stock clock speeds) in a 3D scenario. The G80 doesn't have that sort of power management, but I could keep my idle temperatures lower by creating an underclock profile which ran at about 300 MHz.

That's even better advice, I hadn't thought to slow down the card for desktop use. But with her cooling it really doesn't matter. I've already downloaded afterburner which is a nice program for the stress testing but went ahead and just used Ntune. I've got her cards running at 640mhz/1950mhz stable and loaded at startup of ncsoft launcher or steam. It was a lot easier watching the temps using afterburner then the other benchmark & stress programs I was using, so TYVM for that.